Israeli cops keep a watch on this Kannur factory

Kannur: What on earth are Israeli cops doing in Kannur? Policemen from the West Asian country have been visiting a township near Koothuparamba for three years and they do not come with a casebook.

The navy blue shirts donned by the cops in Israel are stitched at an apparel manufacturing unit at Valiyavelicham, 8 km off Koothuparamba.

The company exports about 50,000 shirts to Israel every year. The shirts are stitched with material imported from the United States. “We also supply uniforms to the jail warders in Israel. The clothes are spun in our own factory in Mumbai. We have a yearly order of about 30,000 shirts,” factory manager T V Sanish said.

“We expect to wrest the orders for the trousers from a Chinese factory by next year,” accounts manager Sijin Kumar told Onmanorama.

The apparel factory also gets orders from Kuwait. “We sent a consignment of 50,000 uniforms to the fire force in Kuwait just three weeks ago. We are about to start manufacturing uniforms for the Kuwaiti National Guard and the Philippines army,” Sanish said.

Mariyam Apparel, working out of the industrial park at Valiyavelicham in 2008, specialises in the production of school uniforms, doctors' coats and patient gowns. The firm has been supplying to various organisations in Kenya, Germany, Britain and West Asia for several years.

The King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh is one of the company's customers.

The company managers said that cotton is out of favour as far as uniforms are concerned. Polyester clothes are in demand across the globe. The firefighters in Kuwait have asked for their uniforms to be stitched in poly-wool, a mix of polyester and wool.

The company sticks to high standards. A team from the Israeli police visits the company to inspect the factory every month. They spend about a week in the factory and evaluate the standards. The Israeli police have also appointed sub-contractors for regular quality checks at the factory.

The company is supposed to supply the Israeli police uniforms as a final product, complete with the stitched-on insignia.

Mariyam Apparels was founded by Thomas Olikkal in Thiruvananthapuram in 2006. The production was shifted to Kannur as per the direction of CPM leader Pinarayi Vijayan, the current chief minister, to offset the slump caused by a decline in the fortunes of the Dinesh Beedi Cooperative. The company could employ about 1,000 local people when it set shop in Kannur, Sijin said.

The company now has about 850 people on its payroll. Almost 90 percent of the workforce are women. The unit has a capacity to employ about 2,000 people. The company is struggling with attrition of skilled seamstresses and a lack of manpower to recruit from, Sijin said.

The company's management takes pride in the fact that the employees did not have to resort to a strike in the last 10 years.